The value of hitting the HN front page
mooreds.com
mooreds.com
Later, while cleaning up after the party, I remembered the unusual spike in visitors and decided to check again. To my surprise, there were still hundreds of live visitors. The total visitor count for the day was around 10,000. After tracking down the source, I discovered that a really kind person had shared the directory/landing page I had created just a few days earlier—right here on Hacker News. It had made it to the front page, with around 200 upvotes and 40 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12153811
For me, the value of hitting the HN front page was twofold. First, it felt like validation for my little side project, and it encouraged me to take it more seriously (despite having a busy daily schedule as a freelance data scientist). But perhaps more importantly, it broadened my horizons and introduced me to a whole new world of information, ideas, and discussions here on HN.
Thank you HN for this wonderful birthday gift!
*edited my original comment without mentioning my project*
Yep, that can be useful motivation to get a side project past "works for me" through to "works for others".
The pgautoupgrade project (https://github.com/pgautoupgrade/docker-pgautoupgrade) was one of those. It seems to be going ok too, as others have come along and picked up the majority of development (I'm ~outta time). :)
There are real diminishing returns in terms of follow-up traffic and follow-up effects. As to be expected, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is something that generally happens over time as the novelty of whatever you're writing about wears off. The good part is that as part of this you'll gradually get more regular readers, so there's less pronounced feast-or-famine cycles.
(Here I don't measure visits as there's so much bot traffic noise especially on anything that hits HN, but mostly focus on whether I get actual engagement, if people reach out to me, send me emails and so on)
I think ultimately a blog post isn't interesting because it's on HN, it's on HN because it's interesting.
Tryharding with regards to the HN frontpage is more likely to come at a cost of writing quality, and thus reducing the likelihood of making the front page.
A moderator probably took one look at your username and comment history, decided you were a troll and rate limited your account. You need to learn how to play the game better.
And the aggressive and demeaning tone of a lot of your comments seems intended to invite downvotes. Are you surprised that when you call people simps and angry and selfish that you get downvotes?
The validity of your comments matter far less than your tone and demeanor around here. I don't know if this is your first account here but if it isn't you should know this place is aggressively and mercilessly tone policed.
edit: also editing your comments like that is just lame. For someone who constantly calls other people butthurt you really do seem to be the most butthurt and triggered person here. Sorry I tried to engage with you like a person. Bye.
In meat space, you can do things to change your appearance somewhat, but people gonna people and they're gonna judge you, some times fairly; sometimes not. Online, the only thing people have to go off here is your words, and choosing F0UKYOU-HN belies a certain amount of aggression that is naturally going to start people off on the wrong foot. How do you want people to see you? You could have chosen anything, maybe something bland or generic, like mikelovesbikes32, but in choosing what you chose, you wanted to make a statement, and with your statement, you're "baffled" by why the human being on the other side of the screen might take offense?
I've been scraping /bestcomments[0] since May for https://hcker.news and here are the top users golf ranked by # of best comments.
1st, simonw, 28
2nd, Aurornis, 17
3rd, paxys, 14
4th, tptacek, 12
T5, duxup, 9
T5, godelski, 9
T5, hn_throwaway_99, 9
T6, JimDabell, 7
T6, JumpCrisscross, 7
T6, neilv, 7
T7, andy99, 6
T7, crazygringo, 6
T7, gruez, 6
T7, habosa, 6
T7, kentonv, 6
T7, kragen, 6
T7, stego-tech, 6
T7, userbinator, 6
T8, afavour, 5
T8, Animats, 5
T8, ChrisMarshallNY, 5
T8, codingdave, 5
T8, dang, 5
T8, donatj, 5
T8, lxgr, 5
T8, perihelions, 5
Agreed. I'm always surprised by what hits on the front page.
I think the most important thing is to write something that is interesting and true for you.
Being on the front page of HN is like a TED talk--an effect, not a cause.
I’m probably in the minority, but whenever I read a good blog or article on HN I scan for social media links and follow the author. It has been helpful to find their future work when it doesn’t catch the upvote wave on HN.
A lot of HN participants turn their nose up at other social media sites but I’ve found it very helpful for exactly this purpose. I unfollow people if they’re too chatty or they start engaging in culture war or other topics I don’t care about, which keeps my feed high quality.
Having a high-visibility post on Reddit meant a stressful few hours and some of the most toxic interactions I've experienced.
Maybe it's just a dev thing. Some programming languages can have some really toxic fandom :D
The important part is that HN isn't an echochamber, you get many viewpoints here.
The quality and type of comments were identical on both platforms.
HN specifically seemed to be commenting based on the title and other comments alone. The most common thread of discussion was clearly explained in the first paragraph.
I mean collectively to this website, not to you in particular
HN mods are pretty lenient overall and really seem to only ban after numerous rule violations after giving numerous warnings.
People come to HN comments to have a constructive debate, so they are less likely to downvote for disagreement. I often upvote comments I disagree with if the point is well made.
People come to Reddit to have their beliefs confirmed. The subreddit structure reduces mixing between users with different beliefs, and where that mixing does occur, e.g. on the large subreddits, it tends to turn into a downvote battle.
^ It's not really about intelligence but openness to new ideas. You can have one without the other.
But both flag and downvote are karma-gated (I think the threshold is 500 for both, but I could be wrong.)
A link from HN: Usually comes with thoughtful discussion, and a detectable but temporary uptick in site donations (it's an ad-free, reader-supported project). There are always some detractors, but that's to be expected.
A link from a popular subreddit: A LOT of site traffic and server overload (once in 2015, Google Analytics showed over 6,600 concurrent visitors from /r/TodayILearned), and a lot more bile in the inbox and discussion thread. No uptick in donations.
No surprises there really, but it's useful to verify assumptions.
Did they reach out to you? What was the interview like? Was the post adjacent or directly related to the job tasks?
I have a model that, given a headline, predicts if the story will get >10 votes. It’s a terrible model, for a few reasons. The most fundamental is that if the same article is submitted 10 times it could get wildly different scores, that’s the way it does. The tail end of the model [1] is logistic regression because it deals gracefully with this kind of situation. I wish I knew how to treat this as a regression problem (predict the score), there is probably a better loss function than what I use, but when I treat it at as a regression problem I get an even worse model.
The highest score this model ever gives is 70% for something like “Richard Stallman is dead”
I have another model that predicts If the comment/score ratio > 0.5 which is about the average for the site. This is a much better model, close to the first recommender models I made. Trained on articles with score > 10 the input is less noisy for one thing. It’s how a learned y’all like to talk about cars.
[1] what attention folks call the “head”
My best model was developed about two years ago and hasn't been updated. It uses bag-of-word features as an input into logistic regression. I tried a lot of things, like BERT+pooling, and they didn't help. A model that only considers the domain is not as good as the bag-of-words.
This kind of model reaches a plateau when it has seen about 10,000-20,000 samples so for any domain (e.g. nytimes.com, phys.org) that has more than a few thousand submissions it would make sense to train a model just for that domain.
YOShiNoN and I have also submitted so many articles in the last two years that it would be worth it for me personally to make a model based on our own submissions because ultimately I'm drawing them from a different probability distribution. (I have no idea to what extent submissions behave different depending on whether or not I submit them, I know I have both fans and haters.)
I see recommendation problems as involving both: "is the topic relevant" and "is the article good quality?" The title is good for the first but very limited for the second. The domain is probably more indicative of the second but my own concept of quality is nuanced and has a bit of "dose makes the poison" kind of thinking. For instance I think phys.org articles draw out a conclusion in a scientific paper that you might not get from a superficial read (good) but they also have obnoxious ads (bad). So I feel like I only want to post a certain fraction of those.
So far as regression goes, this is what bothers me. An article that has the potential to get 800 votes might get submitted 10 times and get
1,50,4,800,1,200,1,35,105,8
votes or something like that. The ultimate predictor would show me the probability distribution, but maybe that's asking too much, and all I can really expect is the mean which is about 120 in that case. That's not a bad estimate on some level, but if was using the L2 norm I'd get a very high loss except in that case where it was 105. The loss is going to be high no matter what prediction I make so it's not like I can make a better model can cut my loss in half, but rather I can make a better model and reduce my loss by 0.1% which doesn't seem like too great of a victory -- though on some level it is an honest account of the fact that it's a crap shoot and the real uncertainty of the problem which will never go away. On the other hand, the logistic regression model gives a probability which is a very direct expression of that uncertainty.
Do you incorporate post time into this model?
This is pure anecdata but I've found that certain posting times lead to more upvotes for what feel like the same type of stories.
It would be interesting to see some sort of personas-over-a-day graph.
Submission time is not such a good indicator of who interacts with a post because a post could be active for 12-24 hours and considering most people are awake 16 hours a day you're going to get people from all time zones. It's probably fair to say that comments written around 2am EST were not likely to have been written by North Americans and the same is true for submissions.
I've done some experiments that involved looking at submissions on days of the week individually or looking at dayparts (say the 5am-6am EST slot) or daypart+day-of-week and never felt I got a much better model as a result.
Posts that make it to the front page are good for 12-4 hours, I agree.
But if a post gets less than 4 upvotes in the first 15ish minutes, my experience is that 99% of the time it won't get to the front page.
But the ways of the HN are deep and mysterious, so that's just a guess.
This is the best guide I've found: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Would be interesting to see you could back things out.
I also think there's an effect based on just how fast the new page is refreshed. I sometimes post in the early morning (US MT) and stuff can hang on there for a while (hour or two). By mid-day, it's more like a 30 minute lifetime on that page.
So was that post a while[1] ago about how some times get much more interaction on HN posts by you?
IIRC the result was that you get most interaction to posts in the middle of the day (US time, can't remember which coast; West feels likely), or slightly before, on Tuesday to Friday. No guarantee about the C, though.
___
[1]: Say, two years (plus-minus... one?) ago.
A lot of newsletters, twitter accounts, youtubers, etc. will read the front page and highlight it in their respective medium. Usually, those ones are more niche, and the people who come are more interested. Not counting the SEO boost and the marketing opportunities to share that success on linkedin.
The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44584461 - July 2025 (6 comments)
If you don't promote cool stuff you write, who will?
I've also re-posted some things that others have posted (and others have re-posted stuff I've posted).
I think the key thing is to not spam. I share other people's posts mostly. 90-95% of my posts are what I find that I think the community might be interested in, as opposed to posts of my content.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44292103
And heres the analytics from that time:
I don't reallly bother tracking sign ups as its a totally free app, but from then to now, it looks like i've picked up about 1600 new accounts.
I had a Netlify landing page (CDN), and the web app was a Django app on a single DigitalOcean droplet. I didn't see any complaints of performance issues / resource usage stayed low.
It might not work for all applications, but it tends to hold up great against traffic spikes and the hosting costs stay in the low teens (USD)!
A seeming paradox was that often a high quality comment in another thread led to higher quality leads than a direct post with its spikes.
It is probably not how you’re supposed to do it but it worked for me, and I don’t know another way.
Seems mostly to be a problem where your website is backed by a DBMS, especially when each page impression generates multiple queries. In that scenario, running out of connections probably isn't particularly difficult.
Only time I've actually been knocked offline was when Elon Musk tweeted a link to a blog post I made. That legit drove some real traffic. I'm not sure if it was the filedescriptor ulimit or the number of open connections that killed me, but I did actually blip for a few minutes.
I think if it was a static site generator (jekyll, hugo, 11ty) then there'd be no issue.
The Value of 'The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page' Hitting the HN Front Page
I guess the value would be people might be more likely to prepare with CDNs or engage with comments etc. I wonder if that's measurable.
Of course, it means that a post needs to have more than suitable keywords. So, I never sacrifice the quality of a post just too boost its SEO.
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/how-is-it-like-during-the-first-...
Now, I consider my site as something rather personal, bland, just my babbles, and kinda s**t compared to many of the ones that pops up on Hacker News.
Keep sharing, please. From my POV there’s a lot of shallow, cliche, group-think-y sites / content shared on HN. If you’re true to this mission, yours would be a refreshing change. Thanks.
I submitted them both, but I don’t usually submit stuff, and most of my submissions are one-pointers. These were tutorials or side projects that I thought might be useful to folks. I guess some people agreed.
Most of my karma is comments. There’s really almost no value for me, in limelight. My work is usually “below the radar,” so to speak, and I’m retired. I’m not looking for work or notoriety. I actually kind of like hanging around the joint. I spent most of my career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and that’s sort of what I get, here.
There is also another one about dark/light modes that made it to frontpage but got some pretty nasty comments which surprised me, especially from one person in particular who seemed to make it their mission to write absurd comment after absurd comment ironically acting like exactly the kind of person I described in my blog post.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074861
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557347
It's always a pretty scary few minutes suddenly seeing a traffic spike, my usual thought is "oh no today isn't going to be good", which is mostly a thought process I have thanks to Reddit being incredibly toxic and unpleasant almost 100% of the time. Any time my blog posts have made it there I dread taking a look at the comments.
As my father always says, experience is cheap at any cost!
But the value from all the links SEO wise was more valuable. If you make the front page normally people are going to post you in other places, translate it, or something else, which increases your SEO.
The hug of death isn't that large. I had a 5 euro DigitalOcean droplet running Nuxt, which handled 30k visitors in a single day without CloudFlare caching it. So if you have a decent setup you should be good.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830684
What was really interesting is seeing how many people are scraping the front page of hackernews and storing their data in public github repos. Dozens of them.
And then get rate limited for arbitrary reasons, from arbitrary user behavior, for arbitrary amounts of time (2 hours), preventing involvement in this culture
Unfortunately, I wasn't running any decent stats at the time, but I see now that I'm still getting referrals from "hackernewsletter," although I'm not sure of the source.
It was great to see the traction, but at the same time, it terrified me. I had all kinds of plans: logins, contests, a community, and new retro-styled games. Unfortunately, the "HN effect" paralyzed me. I was too afraid to push updates, fearing I might break something and lose the users I had. That fear persists even today, with a much smaller but extremely loyal user base.
Here was the issue: https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/672
do we have to go there?